Category: Rants

There are more than a few shopping sites out there with these “fancy” picture viewers like Home Depot and Newegg.com. This has to be one of the worst UX patterns out there and every site that uses it never fails...

Came across an interesting quirk today with regards to AddFieldAsXml in the SharePoint API. It turns out that SharePoint doesn’t really give a damn what you want to call your field when it adds it to the list; it’s going...

Aside from hating Flash and Flash-like applications in general, as I’ve stated before, I view Silverlight as a dead/dying technology at the scope of web and business applications. It may retain niche applications in gaming and the Xbox platform, but...

Since I’ve started working with SharePoint back in beta 2 of 2007, I’ve wondered what the infatuation with InfoPath is. Everyone from enterprise architects and business users seems to be very intrigued by it. As a more technical guy who’s...

As a consultant, I feel strongly about giving sound technical advice to my clients, even if such advice means saying “no” to a client or possibly turning back a larger project for a more pragmatic one. It’s about doing the...

The news media has recently been abuzz about about this so-called “Frankenfish“. It’s been puzzling to me what the hullabaloo has been all about. The fact of the matter is that humans have been altering the genetics of just about...

From one of my favorite software engineering books, Eric Brechner’s I.M. Wright’s Hard Code: None of us is as dumb as all of us An especially evil form of interruption is the meeting. A meeting forces you to stop productive...

Professionally, almost nothing aggravates me more than the Math of Mediocrity. The only thing worse than observing failure based on the Math of Mediocrity is having to actively participate in it. Steve Jobs’ Parable of the Concept Car is a...

First, SPMetal is good. It’s very good. Much better than life without it. It encourages more object-oriented programming (instead of XML string oriented programming – blech!) That said, SPMetal falls short of awesome by just a hair. Ideally, one would...

I was recently tasked with taking an exploratory look at the mobile rendering capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to get a feel for it. The short of it is that it’s sad to say that in 2010 (the year, that is),...